'Zombie Prime Minister' Theresa May to Meet the 1922 Committee of MPs

Later on Monday (June 12) Theresa May will address the 1922 Committee of Conservative MPs with her political future in the balance. Over the weekend she sacrificed her two closest aides, but the knives are still being sharpened after her woeful election campaign.

But what is the 1922 Committee and can a Conservative leader survive if it falls out of favor with it?

​The committee takes its name from the date of a meeting — October 19, 1922 — when disaffected Conservative MPs met and decided to pull out of a coalition with the Liberal Party, which was led by Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

It meets every week when Parliament is sitting and occasionally invites the party's leader or other senior figures to address it about matters which concern backbench MPs.

The press and public are not allowed into the 1922 Committee's meetings but journalists will no doubt often hover outside in the corridors of the Houses of Parliament later on Monday to see if they can pick up a sense of how the meeting went and what are Mrs. May's chances of surviving.

After calling a snap election to increase her majority and finding herself forced to go into a supply and demand agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) she is in a desperately weak position as the Brexit negotiations loom.

On November 22, 1956 the 1922 Committee met to discuss replacing Eden, whose health had begun to fail as the pressure of the crisis began to tell on him.

At that meeting the two leading contenders, Chancellor Harold Macmillan, and Home Secretary Rab Butler, addressed the assembled Tory MPs.

Jonathan Pearson, in his book "Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble" wrote: "Butler gave a basic speech, while once again Macmillan seized the opportunity and dynamically addressed the meeting for 35 minutes, focusing on future policy."

In 1974, the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath became vulnerable to a challenge when he mistakenly called a snap election which led to him losing his majority.

In February 1975 Margaret Thatcher, who had just taken over from Edward Heath as the leader of the Conservative Party, was given a "rapturous reception" by the 1922 Committee.

In her speech, she said: "In the last few years some people have been feeling that there was an almost inevitable march towards socialism.

"But when I first came into politics there was an almost inevitable march towards the Conservative society, with most people wanting to own their own homes, taking an interest in their children's education, welcoming policies for the reduction of personal taxation, and rising to the challenge of being responsible for their own future. We must fight again to recreate that spirit."

Fifteen years later, at the height of the protests against the poll tax, Thatcher got a much rougher ride from the 1922 Committee before she eventually resigned after a leadership challenge.

Hello,
!

We are committed to protecting your personal information and we have updated our Privacy Policy to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a new EU regulation that went into effect on May 25, 2018.

Please review our Privacy Policy. It contains details about the types of data we collect, how we use it, and your data protection rights.

Since you already shared your personal data with us when you created your personal account, to continue using it, please check the box below:

I agree to the processing of my personal data for the purpose of creating a personal account on this site, in compliance with the Privacy Policy.

If you do not want us to continue processing your data, please click here to delete your account.

promotes the use of narcotic / psychotropic substances, provides information on their production and use;

contains links to viruses and malicious software;

is part of an organized action involving large volumes of comments with identical or similar content ("flash mob");

“floods” the discussion thread with a large number of incoherent or irrelevant messages;

violates etiquette, exhibiting any form of aggressive, humiliating or abusive behavior ("trolling");

doesn’t follow standard rules of the English language, for example, is typed fully or mostly in capital letters or isn’t broken down into sentences.

The administration has the right to block a user’s access to the page or delete a user’s account without notice if the user is in violation of these rules or if behavior indicating said violation is detected.